In Italian, prepositional constructions consisting of a preposition and a nominal
word are used to express the same syntactic and semantic functions encoded in Serbian
through morphological cases with or without prepositions. Taken separately, these
categories have been examined in great detail in the literature, and they have been
thoroughly studied not only from the point of view of inflectional morphology, but also
from syntactic and semantic perspectives. However, the functions these categories perform
in the two languages have to date been compared only sporadically and in very general
terms, without any attempts of a systematic and exhaustive contrastive analysis. One of the
consequences of this comparison being neglected are numerous difficulties that speakers of
Serbian encounter when acquiring Italian prepositions, as well as those that native Italian
speakers have in acquiring Serbian cases. This dissertation constitutes the first attempt to
create a general model for

the contrastive analysis of Italian prepositional constructions and
Serbian cases with or without prepositions from a functional point of view. Its main aim is
to apply the proposed model to establish the means used by these two languages to express
the same functions, and by doing so, to facilitate their acquisition for Serbian speakers
learning Italian, as well as Italian speakers learning Serbian as an L2, providing a
framework for the structuring of the teaching materials.
Additionally, since the focus of this research is on two functionally parallel, but
formally distinct phenomena, one belonging to a prevalently (but not exclusively) analytic
system – Italian, and the other belonging to a predominantly synthetic system – Serbian, the
two languages are also compared with regard to the (im)possibility of expressing different
functions analytically and synthetically. The second goal of this dissertation is thus to...